With the advent of the information age, the volume of documents that have been created, stored, communicated has grown dramatically, while the complexity and variety of different types of documents has experienced equally robust growth. Furthermore, documents are often no longer used as unitary elements that are native to their specific formats. Instead, a typical use, e.g. a presentation, often involves using documents of a variety of different formats e.g. portable document file, word processor file, spreadsheet file, slide presentation file, portable audio file, video file, etc. These documents can be gathered together to represent a collection of documents, which we call a composite document. The secure creation, management, use, monitoring and disposal of such documents are a significant part of enterprise document lifecycles.